


Run Away With Me

by Tangerine_Catnip



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Road Trip, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Inspired by Music, M/M, Slice of Life, Slow Burn, Suicidal Thoughts, Underage Drinking
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-26
Updated: 2018-04-20
Packaged: 2019-04-08 12:40:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14105574
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tangerine_Catnip/pseuds/Tangerine_Catnip
Summary: Four years ago, Taako and Lup agreed to a plan; the moment they graduated high school, they would set off on a cross-continental road trip to the biggest city on the east coast: Waterdeep. Sure, the idea originally didn’t include dragging a pair of boyfriends along for the ride, but any good adventure has room for improvisation.





	1. Day 1

**Author's Note:**

> so, I needed something lighter to work on in between chapters of my other TAZ fic to keep up my momentum. Chapters for this will probably vary in length depending on how much trouble these four can get up to in a single day. 
> 
> Also, I'd like to give some special thanks to J and T for suggesting ideas that will be coming up in some later chapters.

“We haven’t even started, and you’ve already lost the map?”

“It’s not lost, I know it’s in here somewhere,” Lup insisted as she pulled a tangle of accessories and makeup containers from the glovebox and dumped them into her twin’s lap.

Taako picked through the pile and found a spikey choker. He snapped it around his throat and pulled down the vanity mirror to see how it looked. The glass was cloudy and surrounded by faded flower stickers that were probably put there by the unsupervised child of the car’s previous owner. 

“What’s taking Barold?” 

“He stayed up half the night watching YouTube videos about efficient packing, and he’s still trying to find the best way to fit everything.”

Taako clicked his tongue and pulled his phone out from the front pocket of his faded denim shorts with the rhinestone heart on the right buttcheek.

“I’ll tell Kravitz we’re going to be late…” 

“Pfft, late? Babe, it’s a road trip. We’re going to get wherever we’re going exactly when we’re meant to be there.”

“I thought we were going to Waterdeep?”

“Yeah that’s the plan, but who knows what could happen out there?”

“And that super important interview for your dream job?”

“-is two weeks away, we’ve got plenty of time.” 

Taako shrugged. Lup was right, even if they only drove five hours a day they’d still make it. Still, something about her nonchalance felt a little forced. If Taako knew his sister, which he absolutely did, she was probably trying to convince herself that it wasn’t a big deal to soften the blow if it didn’t go through.      

 “It’s 18,432 BT-dubs.”

“What?”

“The volume of Barry’s bag in cubic centimetres. He calculated it.”

“Pffft, nerd.”

“I know right? Ah, there it is!”

Lup finally pulled her hand out of the glovebox, her fingers closed around a folded square of paper. She sat back in the driver’s seat and began unfolding the map. It grew bigger with every motion until she had to rest the paper against the wheel and dashboard to help keep it up.  

The whole of Faerun was laid out on the map. Thick yellow lines representing the interstate highways connected every major city from one coast to the other, cutting through mountain ranges, winding through gorges and sailing over rivers.  

Lup had drawn over some of the yellow lines with a red marker, covering over scores of other lines drawn in pencil over the last four years as this trip was planned and re-planned.

“Okay but, why don’t we just use GPS?” Taako asked, holding up the phone he had just used to text his boyfriend.

“This is cooler! Also, data charges, dude.”

“Oh right.”

The door of the house they were waiting outside slammed, drawing the twin’s attention. Barry was making his way down the walk, a wine-red backpack slung over one shoulder. Lup pushed the map up onto the dashboard and jumped out of her seat, meeting him halfway up the drive.

“God, you really took forever didn’t you, slowpoke?”

“Yeah, I’m sorry,” Barry admitted, rubbing the back of his neck with one hand. “I’ve lived in this house my whole life. It’s kinda strange to think I might be leaving forever.”

Lup nodded, looking up over his shoulder at the simple two-story building with it’s perfectly trimmed hedges and white shutters.

“Don’t be, I’m only teasing. We know this is a big change for both of us. You can take all the time you need,” Lup replied, taking a step closer and resting her hand on Barry’s cheek.

“No, I’m alright now,” Barry insisted. Pressing his hand against Lup’s “After all, this is just a house. You’re home.”

“Boooooooooooo!” Taako shouted, leaning out the car window. “That’s the cheesiest thing I’ve ever heard.”

Lup flashed him both her middle fingers, then grabbed Barry around the middle and pulled him into a deep kiss with plenty of tongue.

Taako covered his eyes and dropped down into his seat. “Ugh! Fine, just let me know when you’re done.”

Ten minutes later Lup and an extremely out-of-breath Barry settled into their seats, Lup at the wheel, Barry in the back. Taako had slumped down in the passenger seat to the point where his feet on the dashboard were up higher than his head, his face buried in the screen of a Nintendo DS.   

“Nuzlocke run?” Lup asked as she fastened her seatbelt.  

“Yup. What starter should I pick?”

“Fire, duh.”

* * *

 

Lup pulled up outside the stately manor home, ignoring the paved driveway that snaked through the courtyard and ended at a pair of huge wooden doors framed by marble columns.

Kravitz was sitting on the lip of a stonework fountain halfway up the drive, his legs crossed and a book resting on his thigh. Taako unbuckled and jumped out of the car, barely giving Kravitz enough time to stand up and put his book down before a joyous bundle of blond hair and sparkly fabric leapt into his arms. They kissed, and for a moment it looked like Taako was aiming to out-class his sister in the tonsil hockey arena, but before he could get properly into it, Kravitz gently placed Taako on the ground and straightened up.

Lup followed her brother up the drive, swinging the car keys around her index finger. She stopped a few feet away from the happy couple, her eyes narrowing to slits.

“What is that?” Lup asked, pointing.  

“My bag?” Kravitz replied.

The three of them were silent for a moment as they looked at the bag. It was a black clamshell that went up higher then Kravitz’s hip. If it had a more flowery pattern, it wouldn’t be out of place trailing a pair of retirees through an airport.

“Yeah? Yeah, no. Nope, that isn’t going to fit,” Lup decided. She turned on her heel, cupped her hands around her mouth and yelled back at the car.

“Hey, Care-bare!”

Barry hopped out of the back and jogged over, stopping by Lup’s elbow and giving her a salute.  

“Yes, ma’am?”

“Could you help Raven boy repack his shit?”

Barry glanced over at the bag, a smile spreading across his face. “Oh sure!” he took Kravitz by the elbow and grabbed the bag with his other hand, leading both towards the mansion.  

“Wait, wait. If we’re short on room, why don’t we just take one of my mom’s SUVs?” Kravitz asked.

Barry, Taako and Lup all exchanged a look.

“Anyway, hurry back snookums,” Lup said, sideling over and giving Barry a playful slap on the ass. “-I can hear the road calling us.”

Barry blushed and tugged on Kravitz's arm again. “Don’t worry man, we got this. Just wait till you see how small you can fold your socks.”

 

* * *

 

Thirty minutes later, Taako had gotten his first gym badge and migrated to the back, while the boyfriends had finished shoving a much smaller duffle bag into what little space there was left in the trunk. Taako closed his DS as Kravitz sat down beside him.

“How long is this trip again?” Kravitz asked.

Lup buckled herself in, waiting till Barry slammed his door shut before starting up the car.

“I’dunno, two weeks probably,” Lup replied.

“And we’ve got everything we need for a two-week camping trip?”

“Probably not,” Barry admitted. “We’re going to have to improvise here and there.”

“Right…”

Taako pulled his backpack out from under the driver’s seat and started pawing through it until he found a supermarket-sized package skittles. He tore it open with his teeth, shoved a handful into his mouth and passed the package to Kravitz.

“Don’t fuss about it, Deadman, Quinceañera and I have been working on this for so long we’ve basically already thought of everything,” Taako insisted around the candy.

“Bro, tunes?” Lup asked.

“Oh yeah,” Taako swallowed and fished around in his bag again, grabbing a small plastic box with a handwritten label and passed it to Lup.

“Is that a cassette tape?” Kravitz asked.

“Mixtape. We made it ourselves,” Lup explained as she popped it out of the case. “There’s one for every day.”  

“What? How? Why?”

“Thrift shop.”, “It’s all the stereo takes,” Taako and Lup replied in order.

Sure enough, when Kravitz looked at the dashboard, he could see that underneath the radio there was only a small square hole with a little flap.

Kravitz was stunned into silence. When had tapes gone out of fashion? When had CD’s been invented? And leading directly from those questions and probably most important; How old was this car??

Lup shoved the tape into its slot, and sure enough, one of last summer’s big pop hits came crackling out of the speakers.

“Alright, is everyone buckled in?” Lup asked.

“Darling, you aren’t going-? Barry started to ask, but Lup cut him off.

“Yeah?! Let’s go!” With that, Lup slammed her foot down on the gas peddle, tearing away from the curb as the tires screamed and she hooted at the top of her lungs.  

* * *

 

Lup landed on her right foot on the last of the stone steps, then turned her body 80 degrees before planting the left. From her vantage point, she could see all the way down to the bottom of the hill. Barry was closest, only four or five steps behind her, but Taako and Kravitz were still only halfway up and seemingly getting slower.

“Hurry up, we’re almost there!” Lup shouted.     

Taako stopped on one of the steps, readjusting the straps of his backpack on his shoulders. “Are you sure we’re going the right way?” he yelled back.

“Yes!... Probably? I was like only mostly drunk the last time I climbed up here!”

“I was sober, this is the right way,” Barry insisted.

Kravitz hovered beside Taako, reluctant to move on until he started moving again. “Do you want me to carry the bag?”

“Oh, well sure, if you insist,” Taako replied, sliding it off his shoulders and passing it over. It was the same one Taako used to take with him to school every day, made of well worn black canvas and absolutely covered with buttons.

There was a rainbow flag for himself, a blue, pink and white flag for Lup, the logo for their School’s GSA (which tragically only had two members left now they had graduated), along with a smattering of other left-leaning political statements on everything from reproductive rights to national fiscal policy. There was also Taako’s Hogwarts house, (Slytherin natch) characters from cartoons, disney movies, indie games, and some very cute anime boys that Taako had picked up for free at a con and couldn’t remember where they were supposed to be from.

Kravitz pulled the pack on. It wasn’t heavy in the slightest, but now that Taako had it off he was practically springing up the steps with the grace of a mountain goat.

Barry watched as Taako flew past him to catch up to his sister and raised his eyebrows at Kravitz. “I think you’ve just been had.”  

Kravitz shrugged. Though he didn’t doubt that Barry was at least half right about that.

The twins led the way down the twisting path until they reached a break in the forest. The leaves on the surrounding trees made it look almost like a gateway with the bright mid-afternoon sun behind it obscuring what lay beyond.

Once they were all together, the four travellers stepped out into the clearing. A rough wall of rock stood before them, a cascade of white water pouring down its surface. The stream diverted into hundreds of smaller rivulets on the way down, accounting for each tiny inset or fracture in the stone. Once at the bottom, the water collected into a round pool with two smaller streams feeding from it and streaking off into the forest.

“Tada! Skinny Dip Pond!” Lup proclaimed, waving her arms around like she was presenting a prize on a game show.

Kravitz glanced down at a bronze plaque mounted on a stand near the trailhead. “It says here that it’s called blackwater lake.”

“More like bareback lake!”

“Looks like no one else is here...” Barry observed, taking another look around.

“Yup!” Lup agreed, halfway through unbuttoning her red jacket.

“Lulu, please…” Taako whined, already averting his eyes.

“Come on, babe, this could be our last chance to do this! Just think if it like when we took baths together.”

“What, when we were six years old? I think a few things have changed since then!”

Lup shrugged off her jacket and pulled her black t-shirt with the green day logo on it over her head. Next came a pair of fingerless gloves, then her boots, her lace choker, and finally her pants (over and under) and bra. Taako was actively covering his eyes at this point, while Kravitz was making a study of his shoes.

After one last check to make sure she got everything, Lup planted her heel into the grass and made a running leap towards the pool of water, tucking her feet up and landing in a cannonball with a huge splash. She broke the water with a flip of her hair, shouting “Holy shit, that’s cold! Fuck!”        

Lup wrapped her arms around herself and coughed, “I mean... come on in, the water’s great!”

Barry looked over at Taako and Kravitz, shrugged his shoulders and said, “You heard the lady.” He stripped down, his jeans landing in the grass next to Lup’s red jacket. His splash was even bigger then Lup’s, as was his scream when he realised just how cold it was.   

Lup swam over to him and wrapped her arms around his neck, both still breathing heavily from the temperature shock.

“Taaaaaaaaaaaaaaako, don’t make me come out and get you!” Lup called.

“Okay fine! But only if you two promise not to do anything funny.”

“Us do something funny?” Lup asked, trying and failing to suppress a shit-eating grin. “Never.”

Taako rolled his eyes and started to undress. He left his boxers on until the last second, sitting near the edge of the pond and dropping into the water the second they were off.    

Kravitz was the last to get into the pond, mostly because he was the only one to bother folding his clothing after taking it off. Taako waited impatiently, shifting from foot to foot, goosebumps rising on his arms.

As soon as Kravitz dropped in, Taako pounced on him, dragging him deeper into the water and clinging tightly.

“It will feel warmer if you start moving…” Kravitz suggested.

“Yeah bro, don’t you know anything?” Lup butted in. “Here, I’ll help.” Lup pushed off from Barry and waded over to her twin. Taako backed away from her, sensing what was about to happen.  

 “Splash fight!”

Lup slammed her arms down on top of the water sending up a huge cascade in all directions, soaking everyone around, including herself. Taako let out an irate yelp and retaliated, dragging his hand across the surface of the water to send a wave back in Lup’s direction, soaking her upper body.

The fight continued in that vain for a while, the twins in the centre like the eye of a hurricane, splashing back and forth while Barry and Kravitz occasionally stepped in to support their gladiator.   

Lup gave up first, apparently out of concern for her hair, conceding the match to her brother and swimming back over to Barry for consolation cuddles.

Kravitz waded over to an exhausted and heavily panting Taako and gently brushed his wet bangs aside.

“Feeling any warmer?” Kravitz asked.

“Mmm, umhum…” Taako confirmed, sinking down into the water until only his neck and shoulders were above the water line. “This is kind of fun actually. I mean, the water gets everywhere when you have a suit on, but this still feels different?”

Kravitz nodded his agreement as he leaned against a half-submerged bolder.

“You’re pretty comfortable letting it all hang out?” Taako observed, letting his eyes linger on Kravitz’s chest and shoulders. 

“Bodies are bodies. After you’ve seen ten or so, you start to realise there’s not all that much worth gawking at.”

“You see a lot of naked bodies?”

“Mostly dead ones.”

“Oh right. Funeral biz.”

Taako swam closer and curled up on top of a smaller rock resting on the bottom of the pond. “But doesn’t your family, like, own that shit? You don’t really need to go into the back rooms and see that.”

“I prefer knowing how it’s done. Deceased people are still people, and they deserve every bit of respect and dignity we can give them.”

Taako nodded. It suddenly occurred to him that he had been so distracted by his own embarrassment he had completely failed to make certain observations. After three months of dating, he probably wouldn’t have picked this for the ideal setting to see his boyfriend naked for the first time, but since they were already here…  

Taako started by looking at the trees just to the left of Kravitz then slowly dropped his gaze to the waterline, then lower.

“Keep in mind that this is cold water,” Kravitz reminded Taako gently.

“Noted.”

“…”

“Nice,” Taako surmised, flashing his wannabe TV-star smile.

Kravitz laughed, though Taako could tell by the reddish tinge in the tips of his ears that he was blushing.  

“You’re not so bad yourself…” Kravitz replied, returning the appraising look Taako had just given him. Kravitz searched for something else to say. Nothing too sexual, this wasn’t the time or place for that, but something that would hint at his ongoing appreciation of the testament to excellence that was Taako’s backside.     

Meanwhile, Taako was glaring over to the other side of the pond, his pointed ears slicking backwards like an agitated cat.

“Barold!” Taako shouted, “I swear to fucking god, get your fingers out of my sister! I am standing right here!”

Barry looked over, his expression very clearly that of someone with his hand caught in a cookie jar. Lup managed to hold it together though, and even had the audacity to batt her eyelashes innocently at her twin.

“Ew. Taako, get your mind out of the gutter, we were just hugging!”

“Oh yeah? Hey Barry, why don’t you get out of the water and show us how much you totally don’t have a raging hard-on right now?”

“That doesn’t prove anything! Barry can get hard if I so much as put my foot in his lap.”

“What!?” Takko exclaimed before exploding into a fit of laughter. “I’ve got bad news for you, Lulu, that’s not because of how hot you are, or how loose a trigger Barold has.”

Barry had let go of Lup by this point and had almost disappeared under the water, his face red as a cherry tomato. Lup stared at him for a second, realisation slowly dawning in her features.

“We’ll talk about this later…” Lup murmured in his direction.

“I’m going to die, this is how I die,” Barry muttered at no one in particular.

“Boning down in the water is overrated anyway, it’s just awkward and messy,” Taako surmised, graciously changing the subject in case Barry really could die from embarrassment.

“Pffft, and you would know?” Lup shot back.

Takko huffed in mock offence and said, “Stop virgin shaming me.”

Lup opened her mouth to fire back, but then she thought about it for a moment.

“Okay, fair.” She admitted. “Sorry, Taako.”

Shortly after that, the twins and Kravitz hauled themselves out of the water to dry off and have lunch together. Barry stayed in the water a little while longer to ‘cool off’ (his words).

Lup laid out the picnic blanket while Taako grabbed his backpack and dished out the sandwiches he had made this morning after sneaking into the home ec room. All four were variations on the Monte Cristo, accounting for the taste of the recipient. Lup’s had ham, Barry’s had mayonnaise, Taako’s had an extra slice of bread in the middle, and Kravitz’s was made with flavoured tofu and dairy-free swiss-cheese substitute.  

Taako had marked the foil wrapping on each with a single letter, L, B, T, and K. Though the one marked with K also had a little heart drawn on it.

Barry finally returned from the water, and the four of them sat down to eat. They didn’t talk for a while, letting the gentle roar of the waterfall and the occasional whining cry of cicadas fill the air.

After she had finished her sandwich, Lup laid down on her back and rested her head in Barry’s lap. Barry moved to run his fingers through Lup’s hair from roots to ends, being careful not to ruffle it up too much and spoil the work she’d put in to keep it tame and flat.           

Taako followed her lead, though it took him a little longer to find a position both he and Kravitz could agree on. They ended up lying down with Taako’s head propped up in the crook of Kravitz’s arm.

Everyone had left their phones back in the car, so it was hard to tell how long they might have been out in the woods, but the sun had definitely passed its high noon perch when Lup spoke up.   

“Come on. If I stay here much longer, I’m going to fall asleep, and we’re going to lose half the day.”

She stood and threw her arms up into a full body stretch, tightening then releasing all the muscles in her arms, shoulders, torso, and legs, and following it up with a huge yawn. That sorted, she offered her hand to Barry, pulling him up with surprisingly little effort considering he had at least a foot on her hight-wise.  

“Will you boys pack up? Barry and I are going to go on ahead,” Lup asked.     

“Can do, Lu,” Taako replied, waving her away with the hand not wrapped around Kravitz’s shoulders.  

Lup nodded and led Barry away by the hand. “Don’t forget to follow the trail markers, if you get lost in the woods and eaten by bears it will spoil this whole trip!”

“Yeah, yeah,” Taako muttered, nuzzling his face back into Kravitz’s chest.

The sound of Barry and Lup’s footsteps through the crinkling underbrush faded away, and the ambient silence crept back in until…  

“You wouldn’t let me get eaten by bears, would you?” Taako asked. 

“Uh… No? but I don’t think this is bear habitat, we’re too far south.”

“What would you do if we found one, though?”

“Depends. How far away is it? Is it defending cubs or a food source? is it a black bear or a grizzly bear?”

Taako pulled the arm under Kravitz’s neck back and pushed himself up with it. His hair had gotten tangled in the splash fight, and now that it was dry it had started to frizz up as well. With the sun on his back, it almost looked like a golden halo.

“Yell at it, probably,” Kravitz admitted. “Animals are usually more scared of us then we are of them.”

Taako nodded. “You can be really scary when you want to be.”

“Thanks?”

“Remember that time in junior high? Ricky DeLuna nearly pissed his pants when he saw you coming up with that textbook in your hand,” Taako laughed and sat up, pulling his messy hair back and tying it with a hair elastic he had been wearing on his wrist. “Were you really going to hit him?”

“I don’t think so. Braking the tension was enough.”

“It was so stupid anyway. As if I would steal Ricky’s ugly-ass sports jacket. That thing smelled like vomit and sweat had a baby and used it to line the nest.”     

“So, you didn’t take it?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so. I just never got around to asking about it.”

Kravitz sat up as well and began to gather up the remains of the lunch spread while Taako folded up the blanket.    

“Did you know you loved me then?” Taako asked.

“No, I didn’t. I had a lot of things on my plate back then. Between class, music lessons and tutoring there wasn’t really time to think about relationships.”

“So that’s why you were in the closet so long?”

“Not quite, I didn’t even realise there was a closet. I just didn’t think about it all that much.”

“I wish I’d had my phone with me when you walked in on our GSA meeting, Lup’s face was fucking priceless. She insisted that she’d always known and I mean, yeah, duh, the king of the goths being gay is like super obvious in hindsight, but if she really called it, you know that she would have been pushing us together since day one of freshman year. It was bad enough when everyone else found out and assumed that we were dating just because we were the only out gay guys.”

Taako stood up with the blanket folded over his arm. Kravitz held the backpack open, and Taako shoved it inside.  

“We really goofed up proving them wrong on that one, huh?”

“We don’t need to prove anything to anyone, Taako.”

Kravitz slung the pack over his shoulder and took one last look at the waterfall.

“It’s nice here.”

“Mmhum, to be honest, I wasn’t expecting much from the random spot in the woods where people go to get laid, but this looks like some shit out of a magazine,” Taako agreed.

“We should come back sometime.”

Taako flinched. Kravitz thought he caught the motion out of the corner of his eye, but when he turned to look at Taako, he was smiling and nodding his head.   

“Oh yeah, absolutely.”  


	2. Day 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW for discussed suicidal thoughts

 “So, Is it real?”

Kravitz looked around at the mixed looks of curiosity and horror on the faces of his companions, then back down at the glass case incorporated into a stone podium in front of them. Inside, resting in a pyridoxaly modern looking casket, was what looked like the mummified body of an adult woman and a small child.

Kravitz rested both hands on the stone and leaned in for a closer look.

“Usually, I deal with bodies more recently deceased than this, but it all seems to be there. If it’s a forgery, they put a lot of effort into it.”

“Whoa,” Lup and Taako commented in unison.

Barry kept looking at Kravitz, and once the twins weren’t paying attention to either of them, he mouthed, “Really?”

Kravitz shook his head and mouthed back “No.”

“That’s gotta really suck. First, you die out in the desert, then your body gets put on display as a roadside attraction,” Lup said.

“Eh, at least this way people know she existed. Speaking for Taako here, dying alone and being forgotten is like the worst of all the options,” Taako replied.

There were various other mismatched artifacts dotted around the corrugated steel shed they were standing in, which had been given a second or two of attention on their way over to the main display case, including a car that supposedly belong to a famous dictator, a collection of wax sculptures of people experiencing various medieval torture methods, and a smattering of guns dating back to the 1500’s.        

“I wonder how she died,” Barry murmured.

“Oh yeah! Krav, can you determine the cause of death?” Lup asked.

Kravitz raised his eyebrows at her and crossed his arms over his chest. “I think you’re fundamentally misunderstanding the job requirements of a funeral director. Morticians prep bodies for funerals, doctors perform autopsies.”

“Can’t you take a stab at it?” Taako asked, his lips turning down into a pleading pout.

Kravitz sighed and leaned back down to look at it again. 

“I don’t see any abrasions or puncture wounds, and if the baby is hers it probably wasn’t old age or birth complications… so, disease or starvation, leaning more toward disease. Mummies happen more often after a proper burial, since lack of oxygen and compression are contributing factors.”

“Oh, huh...” Taako replied. Suddenly the body in the casket seemed a lot less strange and creepy and more depressing.

They stood in silence for a moment until Lup asked.

“Do you guys want to leave now?”

“Yes,” Barry replied firmly.

They went out through the gift shop, past a display of yellow shirts, travel mugs and stickers, with the slogan ‘The thing! The mystery of the desert!’ printed on them.  

“I didn’t like that as much as I thought I would,” Taako admitted, as they crossed the parking lot back to the car.

“You can’t call them out for false advertising. They said it was a thing, and it was definitely a thing. The billbords didn’t say if it was a nice thing or a bad thing,” Lup said.

“True. What’s next?”

* * *

 

Taako leaned over the railing, pulling himself up on his tip-toes to get a better look down the huge concrete shaft. Taking a rough estimate, Taako would have guessed it was about six stories deep, although the bottom of the shaft was obscured almost entirely by the rocket boosters of the missile housed within it.

A hand closed around the back of Taako’s tank-top, and he turned to see Kravitz holding on to him. Taako smirked, but then he noticed the way Kravitz’s jaw was set, and he decided that he should probably take a step away from the edge.

He held Kravitz’s wrist as he dropped back down onto his heels, wrapping his boyfriend’s arm around his middle and hugging it to his chest. Kravitz smiled gratefully, bringing his other arm up to cuddle Taako and leaning in to press a kiss into the spot where his shoulder and neck met.

Lup whistled as she approached the silo and glanced back over at Barry, who still had his head buried in a visitor information pamphlet.

“is that it?” Lup asked tilting her head toward the railings.  

“Yup,” Barry agreed. “One intercontinental ballistic missile, one of about 2,000 that were in operation by 1982. Capable of delivering a nuclear payload to any target over 5,000 kilometres away.”

“Pfft, delivering a payload. What a way to put it,” Lup mused. She got up on the railing just like Taako had a moment ago, one leg folding up to balance her weight.

The walls of the silo were surprisingly uneven. Huge slabs of concrete were stacked like Tetris blocks around light fixtures, and other technical-looking junk, including a series of catwalk-like metal platforms that were folded up against the wall. One further down the shaft was folded out to show how they could be used to perform maintenance on any part of the weapon.

“I kind of want to spit down there,” Lup mentioned.

“Please don’t,” Barry replied, as he joined her by the railing.  

“There’s no chance it might explode, right?”

“Its fuel tanks have been punctured, the silo door is welded shut, the warhead is long gone, and there’s a hole in the reentry vehicle.”

“So, no?”

“it’s perfectly safe, kitten.”

“Well, I’ll trust you on that one, babe, after all, you really know how to handle your big, hard, cylinder.”

Barry looked at Lup for a moment, then sighed heavily. “Really?”

“I’ve been waiting for a chance to say that for half an hour!”

Kravitz cleared his throat to refocus the conversation, and asked, “Barry, just how destructive would one of these be?”

Lup’s eyes lit up like a five-alarm wildfire, and a grin spread across her face. Sensing the oncoming devastation, Barry snatched Lup up off the railing and started petting her firmly from the top of her head down her back, distracting her before she could draw any comparisons between the detonation of a nuclear warhead and the orgasmic phase of his sexual response cycle.

Lup whined and wriggled in Barry’s arms, but as glorious as the joke would have been, she wasn’t going to miss out on head pats for it.

“Well, a Titan 2 like this would have been equipped with a 9-megaton warhead, so probably a B53 bunker buster. Bunker busters, as the name implies, were intended to deliver a powerful shockwave to decimate enemy fortifications.”

Barry shifted Lup in his arms, keeping up the soothing pats with his right hand while the left fished his cell phone from the side pocket of his shoulder bag to quickly double-check his facts.

“Assuming optimal detonation, the blast would level everything in a 12 km radius around the explosion with significant secondary damage for anything within 35k. Every living thing within 6k would receive a fatal dose of radiation, with a further 50-90% casualty rate for everyone living within the next 3-5k.”

Barry paused again to do another quick google then added, “For reference, Inner-city Waterdeep is about 17k from the north wall to the ocean.”

“Hatci-matchi…” Taako murmured, his grip on Kravitz's wrist tightening ever so slightly.

“Are there any working ones still around?” Kravitz asked.

“No, the last of the B53’s were disassembled in 2011, replaced by the B84’s, which only have a nuclear payload of about 1.2 megatons. That’s still about 75 times the yield of the biggest nuclear bomb to ever see use in warfare, and that was perfectly capable of destroying whole cities.”

Lup leaned her head back a little, resting it on Barry’s shoulder. He tucked his phone away and wrapped both arms around her firmly.

“Can we do something that doesn’t involve death next?” Taako asked.   

“There’s a gigantic pistachio nut out by the I-25?” Lup suggested.   

“Done!”

* * *

 

“Okay, how the f-uuuuuuhhhhh-ck, does this look more like a dick than the missile did?” Lup asked, planting both her hands on her hips.

Taako tapped the button on the bottom of his phone, snapping a picture with the gigantic nut in the background. He passed his phone to Lup and pointed to the screen. He’d taken the picture so that the top of the gigantic pistachio loomed over him, particularly the bit where the green inner section was sticking out of the white outer one.

“It’s definitely the shell. If they’d kept it closed, then it wouldn’t be so bad.”

Lup shook her head.

“I don’t know, maybe it’s just us, Taako. Maybe we should take a good long look at ourselves and our sense of humour. I mean we are adults now, we can’t just go around pointing to things and saying they look like penises all day and still expect to be taken seriously.”  

“Un-hun. Hey Lulu, give me a boost so I can make it look like I’m sucking it.”

“Oh, hell yes!”

Lup tossed her hair over her shoulder and kneeled. “Get on my shoulders!”

* * *

 

Lup leaned back against the driver’s side door. Every once and a while, a car would pass their parked vehicle, producing a rush of air and a blast of sound before it disappeared down the long, perfectly straight stretch of highway leading out further then the eye could see.

One car did end up stopping to check that they were alright, only to be waved along with an assurance that they’d just stopped to watch the sunset.

 And what a glorious sunset it was.

The four of them stood shoulder to shoulder, dead nowhere in the middle of the desert, nothing but scrub brush and sand for hundreds of miles in any direction, while the wind ripped unimpeded over the vast tracts of barren earth and the clouds rolled across the sky.

You could walk for hours in almost any direction and still never make it to the mountains that were barely a shadow on the horizon.   

Taako shaded his eyes with one hand until the sun finally dipped below the edge of the horizon. Even after the sun was gone, its light still reflected in the clouds. Dark blue, fiery orange and brilliant yellow mixed together as bright and beautiful as if they had been painted with a brush.

The moon was already at their backs, well along its own trek across the sky, growing brighter and more prominent now that her overpowering sister was taking her leave.

Slowly but surely, the brighter colours faded, leaving only a dark blue that eventually turned to black. Now that the sun was truly gone, the temperature drop was almost instantaneous. Taako shuddered and rubbed his bare upper arms.

“Fuck. Why is it freezing in a desert?” he asked.

“Primarily, it’s due to a lack of precipitation-” Barry began to explain before Taako cut him off.

“Wait, no. I changed my mind. I don’t care.”    

* * *

 

Taako woke to the sound of rumbling plastic. He lifted his arms up as high as the low ceiling of the car would allow, stretching out in the passenger seat and yawning loudly.

He found the source of the sound. Lup’s cell phone, tucked into the odd hollow space in the dashboard under the radio and in front of the cupholders. He blinked down at the screen, rubbing his eyes with the hand that wasn’t holding it. It wasn’t a phone call or a text, no one had service this far out in the desert. The screen was black except for the time, 10 pm, laid out in white text and underneath it the descriptor; Pillz time! o((*^_^*))o

Taako slid his finger across the screen to cancel the alarm, and the phone stopped buzzing.

“Can you grab them for me, Coco?” Lup asked, not taking her eyes off the road in front of her. She had the high beams on, but there was only so much they could do against the endless black blanketing the highway. The clouds that had made the sunset so pretty had since blocked out the moon, taking away the only significant source of light.

Taako nodded and sat up, returning the phone before glancing around the driver's compartment in search of Lup’s purse. He found it hidden in the gap between the driver’s seat and the armrest.

While usually the very definition of ‘c'est la vie’, Lup’s purse was one thing she was very particular about. It was made of real leather, which had been rather worn down when she found it in a plastic bin at a garage sale, but had since had much of its lustre restored through proper maintenance.

It was covered in decorative silver studs, had five pockets with prominent metal zippers, and two separate straps that attached with clasps, so the bag could be worn both over the shoulder and on her hip or thigh.

Taako could recite the contents by heart. Largest pocket had the beauty essentials, lip balm, powder compact, pocket mirror, hairpins, nail file, hand cream. The second biggest had health related things: two granola bars, breath mints, band-aids, a tiny bottle of ibuprofen and two plastic cards with emergency medical information for the pair of them. Then there was a cell phone pocket with room for a charger, and finally, the small outermost pocket where Lup kept her prescriptions.   

Taako unzipped it, and three orange bottles with white printed labels rolled out into his lap. Taako turned on the overhead light and held them up one by one until he’d found the bottles containing Estradiol and Antiandrogens.  

He opened both, placing one pill from each into Lup’s hand. She popped the pair into her mouth, grabbed her water bottle, and took a huge sip to chase them down.

She put it back in the cup holder and said, “Okay, your turn.”

Taako tensed up. He twisted in his seat to get a look in the back. Kravitz and Barry were both passed out. The former leaning against the window and using his suit jacket as a pillow, while the latter was just slumped down with his eyes closed. Taako bit down on his bottom lip, his gaze falling back to his lap. On the first and second bottle a section had been scratched out with a black sharpie and 'Lup' had been scrawled above it, but on the third bottle right above ‘take one tablet every night before bedtime’ was his name.

“Nha, I’m fine,” Taako insisted with a slight shrug as he started to pack the bottles away.   

"That’s not how it works and you know it,” Lup said, shooting Taako an ice-cold glare. “Did you take your dose last night?”

The silence coming from the other side of the car spoke for itself.  

“Okay, from now on we’re taking our pills together,” Lup decided.  

“You don’t have to do that.”

“Apparently, I do, Taako.”

Taako’s fingers tightened around the thin orange plastic. He could always throw it out the window. At this speed and in the dark, they’d never be able to find it.  

“I already tried them, they don’t work.”

“Even if that’s true, you should still take them. We can’t increase your dose until you adjust to the lower one. It’s a process.”

“Yeah, well, maybe I don’t **want** the dose to be higher, like, ever. This is already shitty enough without jacking it up until I’m a half-functioning zombie.”

Lup’s expression didn’t change, but Taako felt a sudden drop in temperature. “Hold that thought, I need to find someplace to pull over.”

Taako sucked in a breath, his eyes darting towards the back seat. “No, no, no, no, don’t! I’ll take them,” He insisted, holding up the bottle and unscrewing the lid.

Lup twisted in her seat to see where he had just been looking. The car started to stray towards the yellow dividing line, but Lup righted it a second later with only a minimal amount of swerving, thankfully not enough to wake either of the boys.

“I get it now,” Lup muttered under her breath. “You haven’t told Kravitz, have you?”

“Of course, I haven’t,” Taako hiss-whispered. “How am I even supposed to bring that up in conversation? ‘Hey sweetie, surprise! Turns out my brain is broken, and I want to kill myself sometimes, but, NBD, really.’”

Lup pursed her lips. “Alright, how about this. If you promise to take your meds, I’ll make sure you can slip away to take them.”

Taako thought about it for a moment, running his fingers through his hair and fiddling with the ends.

“Fine, deal,” he decided.

Lup nodded, satisfied with that, at least for the moment.

“It’s up to you to decide when you’re ready, sweetie. But If you want my advice, you should tell him. You know he’s a good guy. I wouldn’t have let him anywhere near you if he wasn’t. He’s not going to think less of you just because you need a little help to get through the day.”

“It’s not that. I… I just don’t want to worry him. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but my dude is kinda protective. Remember that time I broke my nose falling out of a tree? It took forever to reassure him that no one had attacked me, and that was **before** we were dating. If I tell him, then every single time I don’t text back for a while, or I don’t show up on time for a date or whatever, he’s going to wonder, even just for a moment, if I jumped off a bridge, or into traffic, or sliced open my wrists, or-”

“I got the point, Taako,” Lup interrupted. Part of her wanted to slam on the brakes right now and force her brother to come clean, but that would probably do much more harm than good in the long run. Stubbornness was basically a twin speciality for them. Taako would need to make up his mind for himself, and the best she could do was push him in the right direction.

“-But sometimes you just have to work shit like that out. You’re right, he will probably worry about it, and maybe things might be messy for a bit as you realign and adjust, but trust me, you come out the other end stronger for it. He loves you, babe, maybe even a whole tenth as much as I do. He would want to help you through this.”

Lup watched out of the corner of her eye as Taako took a small white pill out of his bottle and downed it with a mouthful of her water bottle.

Lup eased her foot off the gas pedal, cutting her speed for a moment. She took one hand off the wheel and held it out toward her brother. Taako eyed it almost suspiciously for a second before he reached over and laced his in with hers.

Lup brought their twined hands to her lips and gently kissed her twin’s fingers.   

“It’s going to be okay, kiddo. I’ve got you, and you’ve got me. No matter what.”


	3. Day 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> FYI I've changed the rating for this fic to Explicit as of this chapter.

 

Thanks to Lup driving half the night, the party made it to the Gulf of Luiren around noon the next morning. Further south, the shore was lined with resorts standing shoulder to shoulder, fighting for a thin slice of the coast, but here there were only forest service roads and a thin sliver of national park designated on the barrier islands.

Getting to the islands meant crossing a causeway which was little more than concrete and asphalt built on top of a sandbar. The left side of the road was flanked by partially submerged powerlines, their bases covered in prominent salt stains and clumps of seaweed. The wooden poles looked like they were slowly but surely rotting away, begging one to wonder if the people who had installed them hadn’t thought this far ahead, or if they simply didn’t care.

The Island was hardly a millimetre wide on the map Lup was holding, but when you were actually on ground level you couldn’t see from one coast to the other. As they glided through an endless field of hip-high grass, it was hard to imagine that the ocean was just over the horizon, at least until you rolled down a window and tasted the salty breeze racing back towards the mainland.

Barry pulled up beside the small wooden hut guarding the entrance to the national park and had a brief conversation with the ranger before passing over a few small bills for admittance and camping. According to the ranger, they had gotten out ahead of the usual summer rush and had their pick of spots.

After passing the checkpoint Barry took the next right, and the beach finally came into view. Miles of white sand stretched out in either direction decorated with driftwood, pebbles, glass smoothed by ocean currents, and various other sea debris.

The camping spots were set just behind a row of grassy dunes to protect them from the worst of the ocean wind. The spots were ten by thirty feet, possessing a single parking space, a picnic table, and a small fire pit made from the inner ring of a tire.

A brief disagreement ensued between Lup and Taako about whether the privacy of the last spot on the row was worth the five-minute walk to the bathrooms. After approximately twenty straight rounds of rock, paper, scissors, all of which ended in ties, Lup won the right to pick, choosing the farther one.

The car was parked, the trunk was opened, and the tents came out. From there, they split into two teams, team ‘Skull Crushers’ AKA Taako and Kravitz, and team ‘Vigorous Endothermic Reaction’ AKA Lup and Barry and set to work erecting a pair of two-person tents.

Inside team Skull Crusher’s bag was two folded pieces of Nylon, four collapsible poles and a handful of pegs. Taako and Kravitz laid it all out on the sandy dirt and looked them over.

“Are there any instructions that came with these? Kravitz asked.

Taako took another look at the bag and shrugged. “Doesn’t look like it, but there’s only like six pieces, how hard could it be?”

Kravitz nodded and picked up one of the collapsed poles. A thick piece of stretchy string threaded through 7 sections of hollow fibreglass. He found the one at the end, and it clicked into the next in the chain, piecing them together like Lego bricks until he had an un-collapsed pole.

Taako grabbed a bundle and started following along, piecing together sections until they had all four poles assembled.

Kravitz laid them out on the ground, while Taako went over to examine the tent. He found a section near one of the four corners where the fabric formed sock-like pockets that ran up the side and met in the middle.

“Hey, hey, hey!” Taako called, bouncing a little on his heels.

“Taako, Sweetie, I’m standing right here,” Kravitz replied, nodding towards the scant three feet there was between them.

“I figured it out, all we have to do is stick the poles through there, and it will make it stand up,” Taako explained, sticking a finger into the pocket to illustrate.

“Funny, I could have sworn I said that exact thing to Barry last night!” Lup shouted.

“No one was talking to you!” Taako snapped back, potently turning his back to his sister.

“That would make sense…” Kravitz agreed. “Except why are two of the poles longer?”

Taako looked over, and sure enough, two of the poles they had unfolded were about three inches longer than the other pair.

“Huh…” Taako replied.

“Did it look like-?” Kravitz began to ask. Taako darted over and pressed two fingers over his mouth.

“Hold up. I want you to think very carefully about your phrasing, alright?” Taako said, shooting a glare over his shoulder at Lup who was trying to look like she wasn’t listening.

Kravitz nodded and began again.

“Do any of the pockets look like they could hold a bigger pole?”

Lup snorted and broke out into a fit of giggles. Taako sighed and rested his head against Kravitz’s chest.

“I hardly think that’s fair, anything can sound dirty if you take it the wrong way,” Kravitz protested.

“The longer poles are part of the rain cover. Use the shorter ones,” Barry suggested.

“Ah, of course.”

Taako and Kravitz strung the two poles through the pockets, and with a little bit of combined effort, they pulled the tent up and slotted the ends of the poles into the tabs attached to each corner.

Taako and Kravitz stepped back. The blue and orange tent stood up perfectly fine on its own.

“That wasn’t so bad,” Taako observed.

“Yeah, cuz that was the easy part,” Lup said, falling in beside Taako and flashing him a cheeky grin. She pointed over at her tent, which looked a lot different despite being the exact same model in white and red. The extra piece of nylon had been fixed above the tent with the remaining two poles and grounded by tying it to pegs that were buried in the dirt. There was even a foyer area near the door that shielded it from the elements.

“Since when do you know how to camp?” Taako asked.

“Since Barry’s mom walked in on us doing the dirty in her basement,” Lup explained, holding out her hand and making a show of examining her fingernails. “She was cool with it, but after that we developed an… ‘interest’ in backyard camping when she was going to be around. Y’know, pitch a tent before you pitch a tent?”

Barry stepped in, clearing his throat and swiftly changing the subject. “Keep in mind that the rain fly won't work if it’s touching the tent. The water will saturate both layers and it’ll leak.”

“You aren’t going to help?” Kravitz asked.

“Stud-muffin and I need to drop by the mainland and grab some shit for dinner,” Lup explained, pointing the key fob over her shoulder and clicking the unlock button twice.

“Just give it your best shot, we’ll be back soon,” Barry said.

With that, they got into the car and pulled back out onto the road.

Taako looked up at the clear blue sky, then out at the gentle waves lapping at the sand.

“It doesn’t look like it’s going to rain…” Taako observed.

Kravitz pulled Taako into a hug and pressed a kiss to the top of his head, noting the faint scent of coconut from Taako’s leave-in conditioner.

“Come on, we can figure this out, and we’ll be thankful for the practice when there’s actually rain on the way,” Kravitz said.

“Ugh, why do you always have to be so logical about everything…” Taako complained, digging the toe of his sneaker into the loose dirt.

“It’s a curse,” Kravitz admitted, “I think my grandfather accidentally dug up the grave of a witch.”

Kravitz gathered up a handful of tent pegs and a nice large rock to hammer them in. “Come on, the sooner we finish, the sooner we can go swimming.”

* * *

 

“Sooooooo, Is it too big?”

Lup tapped a finger against her bottom lip as she examined the massive tree branch Taako had clasped in both hands and the impressive mark it had carved into the sand as it had been dragged over.

She found a section in the middle, lifted her right leg, and brought the heel of her boot down with every ounce of force she could muster. The dry driftwood gave a mighty crack and split in two.

“Not anymore,” Lup quipped, taking back her foot and bending down to grab the half of the branch Takko was no longer holding.

Taako shrugged and carried his half over to the circle of rocks they’d arranged on the beach. The twins propped the two halves against one another, forming a new highest point for their unlit bonfire.

Underneath, everything from reclaimed wood, to abandoned cardboard boxes, twigs and fallen leaves was stacked up against each other in a teepee formation, with generous gaps to allow oxygen to enter and smoke to escape.

Barry appeared over the edge of the dunes then skidded down the ocean side, his bare feet pitching up buckets worth of sand.

“So?” Lup asked.

“Ra-ranger’s gone…” Barry answered between panted breaths.

“Sweet!” Lup enthused, grabbing Barry by the wrist and pulling him into a one-armed hug before turning back to Taako. “Does it look about ready to go, Coco?”

Taako examined the improvised fire pit, it was impressive, sure, but the chef in him felt like he was missing the garnish on top that would really tie it all together. Before Taako could figure it out, Kravitz came walking up the beach dressed in his black swim trunks and carrying a white bucket filled to the brim with sea water.

Kravitz dropped the bucket near the firepit, it’s weight making it sink a few inches into the sand.

“That should be enough to douse it if things get out of control,” Kravitz said, adding “hopefully,” once he noticed the huge log that had just been added.

Lup got down on her hands and knees and started poking around the bottom layer of the unlit fire.

“Hey, Taako?” Lup asked. She waited for a moment, but Taako didn’t respond. Lup sat up and waved her hand in her brother’s direction until he finally tore his eyes away from Kravitz’s abdominal muscles.

“Oh! yeah?”

“After you get dressed, grab your backpack and bring it here.”

“Um, sure, why?”

Lup went back to arranging the fire, and Taako shrugged. Kravitz gathered his dreadlocks up in both hands and wrung the salt water out of them. He took Taako’s hand, and the pair of them trekked the long way around the dunes back to their campsite.

The tents were rather small, so everyone had left their bags in the car. Taako popped open the trunk with his set of keys. He and Kravitz took a moment putting together outfits to wear to dinner. After a moment of soul-searching Taako settled on his pyjamas, it was close enough to bedtime, and he didn’t really want to change again that day. Besides, they were **really** cute pyjamas, with a light pink flannel pattern on the bottoms and a white t-shirt top half with a picture of a rainbow-colored binicorn on it.

Taako folded them over his arm and headed to the small concrete building that was the only real sign of civilisation for miles around. Inside was a typical setup, mirrors above sinks and stalls against the far wall, the four on the right had toilets and the remaining three had showers.

Kravitz placed his folded clothing on the bathroom counter, pausing at the mirror to give his hair a once-over.

Taako dropped his towel and PJ’s on the bench near the door and went into one of the shower stalls. He didn’t bother to close the door. All the other campers had left over the course of the day and Barry was helping Lup prepare dinner, so they weren’t going to be disturbed.

Predictably, the water faucet in the shower was a single lever with an on and off position rather than any temperature control. Taako turned it on and put his hands under the water, waiting in the vain hope it might get warmer.

“Is something wrong?” Kravitz asked after about two minutes had passed.

“It’s cold…”

“Even so, you need to wash the salt off.”

“Yeah, but I was just thinking, maybe it wouldn’t be so cold if we shared…?”

Kravitz smirked. “I’m starting to wonder if you wouldn’t be just as happy dating a portable radiator.”

“Pssh, never. Well… maybe, if I could find a radiator with arms as strong as yours,” Taako admitted giving said arms an appreciative once-over. Kravitz had always been on the burly side, but over the course of their senior year, he had turned that bulk into toned and sculpted muscle.

“Why did you get so yoked-up anyway? Are you planning on entering a competition or something?” Taako asked.

Kravitz finished with his hair and squeezed into the stall beside Taako. “Not really, I just thought that being able to carry around 150 pounds of dead weight would come in handy.”

“ah, right. God, do you ever do anything that doesn’t relate to the family business?” As soon as those words left his mouth, Taako wished he could cram them back in.

The smile on Kravitz’s lips faded. “I’m working on it,” he said, taking Taako’s hands in both of his. “I’ve got you for starters.”

He stepped into the shower and tugged Taako along, folding both arms around him. Taako flinched as the cold water hit his back and he ducked his head to bury his face into Kravitz’s chest.

After a few minutes the shock wore off and Taako gently eased himself back a half step. Kravitz moved to take off his swim trunks, and after a nod of agreement, he helped Taako out of his own. If Lup’s obsession with skinny-dip pond had any upside, it was that Taako was officially comfortable being naked with his boyfriend now.

“if you can lift a dead body, then a skinny little guy like me shouldn’t be a problem…” Taako suggested.

“Probably. Do you want to be lifted?”

“Kinda…”

Kravitz considered for a moment, then bent down, grabbed one of Taako’s arms, brought it around his neck and pulled Taako up onto his shoulders like a sack of potatoes.

Taako blinked twice, looked down, then immediately thought better of it.

“R-really?” Taako asked.

“This how you’re supposed to carry a person,” Kravitz explained, “So the weight won’t strain your back.”

“...”

“or were you hoping for something a little more like **this**?”

Kravitz tucked his arm under Taako’s legs and eased him off his shoulders, his hands sliding down to cup Taako’s backside. Taako crossed his ankles behind Kravitz’s back and wrapped his arms around his neck, doing his part to help hold himself up.

“Yeah… this is more like it,” Taako said, smirking up at Kravitz and pulling himself up, so their noses were almost touching.

A twinge of uncertainty lingered in Taako’s chest, he hadn’t quite grasped how vulnerable this position would leave him until he was being propped up against the shower stall wall.

Pushing the thought out of his mind, Taako crossed the last bit of space between them and kissed Kravitz. Cold water soaked through Taako’s hair raising goosebumps along his arms, but he was far too preoccupied to shiver.

Usually, French kissing took a bit of a lead-up, but they both knew that Kravitz couldn’t hold him forever, so they collectively skipped right to the main event.

A few minutes into it, Taako discovered the positioning gave him a key advantage in the tongue wrestling arena. If he wriggled too much, Kravitz would get distracted trying to adjust his hold, giving him a chance to press forward and rub the underside of Kravitz’s tongue with his own.

After about the third time Kravitz finally clued in and instead of pausing to correct his grip he pressed Taako up against the wall. Conceding gracefully, Taako allowed Kravitz to push his wandering tongue back into his mouth and heroically endured the same treatment he had just dished out.

Taako moaned, the sound taking even him by surprise when he heard how needy he sounded.

Kravitz straitened up, his eyes locked with Taako’s.

“Do you want me to touch you?”

Taako almost made a joke about how much he was already being touched, but then he noticed Kravitz’s meaningful tilt of the head and caught the full meaning of the question.

Taako’s breath hitched, a thousand thoughts about how the next few minutes might go flooding through his mind all at once.

“......”

Kravitz kissed Taako softly on the lips and helped him back down.

Now the moment was gone, the paralysing indecision that had gripped Taako’s heart started to ease, just in time to be replaced by a slowly growing sense of regret.

That moment had been perfect. All he’d had to do was say yes.

Kravitz slipped two fingers under Taako’s chin and tilted his head up. “Don’t worry about it. You aren’t disappointing me,” Kravitz insisted.

Taako blinked back at him, suddenly questioning if mind-reading was an actual skill and if Kravitz had mastered it between the piano lessons and advanced trigonometry.

“I want all of you, Taako, not parts of you. It’s not worth doing if you aren’t all there for it.”

Taako swallowed, a faint smile gracing his lips.

“Pft, Yeah, I know, you don’t have to remind me. I’m going to get diabetes if you keep laying it on like that.”

“I think that would probably be from all the energy drinks.”

Taako visibly perked up as he was baited into the familiar argument.

“We can’t all drink black coffee, some of us have taste buds that work.”

“If enjoying the taste of gummy worms marinated in a vat of chemicals counts as ‘working’, I think I got the best end of the deal.”

The banter continued in that vain as the pair finished rinsing up and got dressed. The cold water easing away any trace of the tense moment.

* * *

 

“Here.”

Taako handed his backpack over to Lup and dropped down onto the blanket beside her. Lup wrapped up the remainder of the block of cheese she had been grating, passing it and the plastic bowl to Barry.

Lup unzipped the bag and started digging around.

“I knew it!”

Lup pulled out a huge pile of crinkled paper and held it up so she could read the title page in the diminishing twilight.

“' _To kill a Crayghe: A normative, postmodern, speculative critique._ ’ Christ on a bike, Taako, were you trying to make fun of poor Mr Abernathy?” Lup flipped through the paper until she found a page and a half of comments added in red pen that Taako assuredly hadn’t read. “Eh, you got 60%, so it had to be at least half-decent bullshit.”

Lup ripped the pages out one by one, crinkling them up and adding them to the bottom of the fire.

“Come on, I spent five whole hours on that,” Taako whined.

“Does that include reading the book?

“Part of the book…"

Lup rolled her eyes, kissed her brother on the cheek, and went back to digging through his stuff. She added some unfinished math homework, some chemistry lab notes and a spelling test to the kindling.

Kravitz sat down beside Barry on the wooden bench they had dragged over from the picnic area.

“Anything I can do to help?”

“Sure,” Barry said, passing over an armful of potatoes neatly wrapped in tinfoil. “We’re hurting for counter space so if you could just hold those, that would be great.”

Lup opened a notebook with a wall of stickers plastered on the cover and thumbed through it, occasionally adding pages to the sacrificial alter of flame. Suddenly, she stopped and gripped the notebook with both hands.

“Holy shit! I completely forgot about this.”

Taako tilted his head to the side and looked over Lup’s shoulder. “I haven’t opened that since freshman year, what-”

As soon as Taako saw what was written there, he tried to make a grab for the notebook, but Lup had been expecting it and fended him off with a well-placed elbow.

“Kravy heads up!” Lup shouted, lobbing the book overhand at Kravitz’s chest. Kravitz couldn’t catch it with his arms full of potatoes, so it bounced off his chest and landed in the sand, still folded open to the page Lup had been looking at. Kravitz bent down to look, shifting the potatoes in his arms.

The first sentence on the page was about the war of 1812, but instead of the next part of the lecture, underneath was the acronym M. A. S. H. written dead centre of the page, with the M, A, and H, crossed out.

Below that were five cities under the label ‘location’, five career choices labelled under ‘jobs’, and five names under the heading ‘Future husbands’.

All but one of each category was scratched out leaving; ‘Snakewood’, ‘garbage collector’, and ‘Kravitz’ with a heart drawn next to it.

Under that was a spiral with a line drawn through it. The number of times the line crossed the spiral was written out, indicating the number of times to go around the lists before crossing something out.

A pair of notes had been scrawled at the bottom of the page. Presumably after the future telling game had been completed.

_‘Looks like it’s going to suck to be you, bro.’_

_‘I beg to differ, I could live anywhere with Kravitz.’_

Then just if the point wasn’t clear enough, 14-year-old Taako had decided to write out what his name would look like if he and Kravitz got married and scrawled another half dozen hearts around that.

“Burn it. Just burn it,” Taako demanded, his face buried in both his hands.

“Nha, I think we’ve got enough tinder,” Lup said with a shrug. Nipping over to grab the notebook and shoving it back onto Taako’s backpack.

That done, Lup got up on her knees and took a flip-top lighter out of her pocket. It had a shiny brass finish engraved with a picture of a Phoenix mid-flight and the words ‘Happy 2nd anniversary, love B’. Lup popped it open with her thumb and pressed the button, a small flicker of light and heat illuminating her fingers. She touched the flame to the corner of Taako’s English essay and the whole pile went up. The fire ate through the fuel in a matter of seconds, but that was enough for the wood surrounding it to catch and for the flame to spread throughout the whole pile.

“Ready with those potatoes, goth bro?” Lup asked.

“Uh, sure. What do I do with them?”

“Toss them in the fire. Unless you wanna try cooking with the heat radiating off your abs.”

Barry helpfully passed Kravitz a long stick he had soaked in seawater to make sure it didn’t catch fire.

“Just try to get them into the coals,” Barry explained, “that’s what the foil is for.”  
  
Kravitz nodded and dropped the potatoes into the sand near the base of the fire, using the stick to prod them the rest of the way in.

Twenty minutes later the potatoes had cooked through, been unwrapped very carefully from the blackened foil, and stuffed full of green onion, salsa, avocado, and cheese/cheese substitute.

A hush settled over the foursome as they ate, the gentle crackle and pop of the fire blending in with the regular crash of waves along the beach.

Lup finished her dinner first and had just started packing everything back into the cooler when she said, “Actually, you know what? I think it’s time.”

“Time for what?” Taako asked, but Lup was already halfway up the dunes. She returned a moment later, skidding down the sandy hill with a glass bottle in each hand.

“Booze! Three days is probably long enough to break it out, right?!”

Kravitz frowned. As far as he knew, no one sitting around the fire was within two years of being able to make that purchase legally. “How did you get those?”

Lup glanced at the bottles then back at Kravitz, “Fell off a truck.”

“I bought them,” Barry admitted, raising his hand sheepishly. “I put on my dad-pants and went really late at night. They didn’t card me.”

“Hell yeah! Score one for my darling bear’s adorable muffin top!” Lup cheered, toasting Barry with the bottles. Barry blushed and poked at his tummy, not quite sure how to take that compliment.

Lup dropped the bottles next to the cooler and set about mixing up cocktails. Pouring what vaguely looked like two measures of rum into each plastic cup then filling the rest with cola.

“I’m good, thanks,” Kravitz asserted just as Lup was starting to make a fourth. She nodded and screwed the top back on the bottle before handing out the glasses. Taako took his, then waited for his sister to sit down before kicking back and resting his head on her lap.

Taako took a small sip, his face scrunching up when he realised it tasted like sugary bug spray.

“Lulu, you put in way too much.”

Lup swapped her glass to her left hand and took Taako’s back, taking a sip.

“Tastes fine to me.”

Taako took Lup’s glass and tried some of hers.

“Ick, did you make them all like that? Are you trying to get drunk?

“I’m not NOT trying to get drunk,” Lup admitted. “We aren’t driving tomorrow, anyway.”

Taako passed the glass back, leaving Lup with both. “I’m making my own.”

Taako got a fresh glass and poured in a thin sliver of rum before drowning it in cola. He walked around to the bench Kravitz and Barry were sitting on and poked Barry in the shoulder with a polished fingernail.

“This is your alcohol Barold, so Loopy Lup is officially your responsibly for tonight. Get in there, bud.”

Barry chuckled and stood, swapping places with Taako. Lup chugged the remainder of her bother’s cocktail and snuggled up next to Barry, pulling his arm down over her shoulders.

* * *

 

“Cooooco, itts to quieet, sing smthing with me.”

Taako shook his head and blinked rapidly, he hadn’t realised he had nodded off. The fire was down to few smouldering coals and the stars were out in full force in the sky above them.

Kravitz, who had been serving as Taako’s pillow, was still fast asleep. Over the course of the last few days, Taako had come to realise his boyfriend slept like the corpses he was intent on working on.

“Where’s Barry?” Taako asked, groggily getting to his feet.

“Hesss getting more wood. I told m to ‘ook in his pants.”

“Pfft, nice.”

Taako joined his sister standing in front of the fire with their backs to the ocean. He wrapped an arm around Lup’s middle to help keep her upright and rested his chin on her shoulder.

“Alright, what did you want to sing?”

Lup had her cell phone out and was running down the list of music files stored on it.

“l’dunno…”

Taako shielded his eyes from the glare coming off the phone screen by partially hiding in Lup’s messy hair.

Lup kept scrolling through her phone but nothing seemed to appeal. Barry returned, carrying another armful of driftwood. Taako had to wonder how far he had gone to get it, since they had practically cleared the beach to build the fire in the first place.  
  
“Hey Taako, sorry, did she wake you up?” Barry asked, coming over to empty his armful directly into the fire. It almost looked like he had snuffed it out, but then the flames came back, licking up the sides of the new fuel.

“We’re g’nna sing!” Lup insisted waving her phone in his general direction.

“Uhhun? I’d kinda like to see that,” Barry said.  
  
Barry wasn’t as drunk as Lup, but his cheeks were a notably brighter shade of red than the rest of him, and he had that goofy smile on his face that could mean he was inebriated, lovesick, or more than likely, both.

“This one!” Lup said pointing at the screen with her thumb.

“Lulu, you don’t really sing that one as much as scream it.”

“It’s perfect!”

Taako couldn’t really fault her logic on that one. He shrugged and selected the song from the list, turning it up as high as it would go. Lup tossed her phone to Barry, who thankfully caught it and rested it on his knee with the speakers towards them.

Lup threaded their fingers together and dragged Taako up to the fire, the renewed flames bathing her in golden light. Taako let himself be pulled along. He belted out the lyrics as best he could, but his contributions were almost lost under Lup’s shameless shouting.

She twirled him around, swaying her hips to the beat and bouncing on her heels, putting all her body into it. Every time she finished the chorus, she added a screech worthy of the mythical firebird it invoked.

Lup pulled Taako in close then spun him out. At the apex of the motion Taako lost his footing and landed on his butt in the sand, braking Lup’s hold on his wrist but not her stride.

Barry and Taako watched with wide eyes as Lup swayed in front of the flames, finishing the last chorus as she spread her arms towards the sky, going up on her tiptoes as if she could reach the moon if she tried hard enough…

Then she started to topple backwards.

Taako shot up and grabbed for her, getting there at the exact same moment as Barry, who’d been on his feet but further away. Together they pulled her away from the fire and into a three-person bear hug, Taako under the left arm and Barry under the right.

“Oh, ‘ome on yooh guys I wasn’t g’nna fall,” Lup insisted, squeezing the pair of them.

“That’s enough for tonight,” Barry decided. He bent down, got an arm under Lup’s legs and hoisted her up onto his shoulder.

Taako’s mouth hung open slightly. Barry had always been on the large side, but apparently there was some muscle hiding in there too.

“G’night, Ko,” Lup slurred, giving him a pat on his head.

“Night, Lu,” Taako replied. He watched until Barry made it up the side of the dune while carrying Lup, then set about waking Kravitz, who had even managed to sleep though Lup’s singing.

If he could tolerate that, maybe they were meant to be after all.

* * *

 

“Hey, babe?”

“Mmhm?

“You asleep?”

“No.”

“We should do something. Y’know, to help us sleep.”

“Not when we’ve both been drinking.”

“Psssh, that was hours ago. I’ve sobered up… mostly.”  
  
Barry rolled over and pulled his watch out from under the pile of folded pants he was using as a pillow. It was just after 3 in the morning. He put it back and looked over at the dark shadow that was probably Lup, she was out of her sleeping bag and was sitting with her legs crossed.

“Just lie down and close your eyes,” Barry suggested, burying his face in the crook of his arm.

“I want to try your thing,” Lup insisted.

“What thing?”

“The foot thing.”

Barry tensed up. If he hadn’t been awake before, he certainly was now.

“Lup, we really shouldn’t.”

“But it’s only my feet, right? Plus, dude, I’m going to have to be at least a little drunk to try this the first time.”

Barry sat up slowly, mindful of the low ceiling on their tent, and put his glasses back on.

“I did my toenails last night. Do you want to see?” Lup asked.

Barry swallowed and nodded. Lup unfolded her legs and shoved her left foot right up into Barry’s face. Barry leaned back and closed his fingers around Lup’s ankle, guiding her foot back down into his lap. Barry located his cell phone, activating the flashlight before placing it face down. The light bounced off the roof of the tent, making things just bright enough to see what he was doing.

Barry held Lup’s foot gently in both hands. She’d painted her toenails with a glossy dark red polish that was so completely her it made his chest hurt a little.

Barry had looked at Lup’s feet before… well, he’d looked quite a lot, but that was always with the lingering fear that he might be caught. Barry wasn’t sure why he had found it impossible to bring his ‘thing’ up in conversation with Lup before. It wasn’t as if they didn’t talk about sex. Before they’d got much past kissing, Lup had sat him down and laid out exactly what she did/didn’t feel comfortable doing, and what parts of her body he needed to ask before touching. (He’d done his best to convey the same information to her, though he honestly hadn’t put a quarter as much thought into it as she had.)

Despite this open dialogue, Berry had always fallen back on excuses to avoid talking about it or tried to convince himself that Lup really didn’t need to know. Part of him always secretly hoped she would figure it out, even though he knew how stupid it was to expect her to intuit something he was actively hiding.

Worst of all, the longer it went on, the more guilt he felt for not trusting her with it, making it even harder to come clean. If Taako hadn’t somehow scoped him out from a random offhand comment Lup made, he probably would have held on to the secret for years more.

But now Lup knew and; rather predictably if he’d stopped to think about it for five seconds, (Lup was always one to leap at the chance to try new things, especially if they were weird) she was fine with it.

Barry examined Lup’s toes one by one, rubbing the joints as he went. When he got to her pinky, Lup shifted and rested her right foot in his lap, letting him continue. Lup didn’t seem to be all that ticklish when it came to her feet, a fact Barry noted since it might be useful for future endeavours.

Barry moved his hands to the arches and souls of Lup’s feet, using his thumbs to dig in and massage her muscles. Lup groaned softly, and she rolled her shoulders back, visibly relaxing.

“Let me know if I'm being too rough...” Barry murmured. Lup nodded, but she didn’t say anything to interject.

Barry finished with her heals, cupping them in both hands and giving the entirety of her feet an appreciative look over before bending down and kissing Lup’s toes.

Lup snickered at the image. She’d always wondered if Barry would get down and kiss her feet if she asked him to, though at this point it seemed more likely he would be the one asking for permission.

“So… are they good?” Lup asked.

“Of course they are, their yours,” Barry insisted. He laced his fingertips in with her toes, admiring the shine coming off the polish. “Can I do this next time?”

“What, paint my nails?”

“Uhhun, and um... wash them, and moisturise them...”

“You want to give me a pedicure?”

Barry nodded.

“Sure. Who’s going to say no to that? I get veto power on the colour though. I’m not going around with puke green nails.”

“of course not!” Barry agreed, pressing her feet protectively against his chest apparently even more offended by the notion that she was. “Dark purple maybe, or blue to match your eyes?”

Lup nodded, she had tried both those colours before, but she wasn’t going to spoil the surprise for Barry. After all, he was clearly getting something out of this she didn’t quite grasp.

“Care-bear, this is great and all, but when do we get to the part where you cum on my feet, or whatever?”

“We don’t have to do that.”

“I want to. Show me how to do it. I’d look it up myself, but you know we don’t get internet out here.”

Lup slipped her right foot out of Barry’s hand and pressed the sole against the front of his boxer shorts. Barry tensed and took a sharp breath in. Lup felt his half-hard cock rise to full attention against her toes.

Lup grinned, she was already starting to like this. Or more accurately, the newfound power to tug Barry’s strings. Judging by the grave expression on his face, Barry must have been coming to about the same conclusion.

“R-right, do we have a bottle of lube around?” Barry asked.  
  
“Always.”  
  
Keeping her foot right where it was, Lup reached over to grab her purse. She unzipped the main pocket then opened a second smaller pocket hidden in the lining of the bag where she kept the things she didn’t want her brother accidentally stumbling across when he snooped through her stuff, including several different types of condoms, a bottle of lube and a pocket vibrator.

Lup grabbed the bottle and tossed the bag aside. With a little bit of foot-eye coordination, Lup got her toes around the hem of Barry’s boxers and pulled them down until his dick sprung free.

Lup passed over the bottle, watching intently as Barry popped opened the lid and gently took her left foot in his hand, holding the spout of the bottle over the bottom of her foot.

“Is this okay?” Barry asked.

“Mmhmm,”

With that reassurance Barry squeezed the bottle, laying out a thin line of the gel from toes to heel. Then he swapped hands and did the same to Lup’s other foot. He snapped the cap back on and put the bottle down, taking Lup’s feet in both his hands and guiding the arches together with his cock firmly sandwiched between them. “Just put them like this…”

“Oh! Dhu. Okay, I got it,”

Lup shooed away his hands and grasped her ankles, using the added dexterity they provided to start sliding her feet up and down, spreading the lube out in the process. Conceptually, it really wasn’t all that different from giving a hand job, but it felt new and exciting, and Lup was game to figure out all the nuances.

She tried wrapping her toes around the tip, squeezing him between the bottom of one foot and the top of the other, rubbing in alternating directions with both feet, and running her toes along the underside, each new variation eliciting distinct moans of pleasure from her partner.

It’d been a while since Lup had seen Barry come undone like this. He had leaned back so he could see all of her and had an expression of such complete devotion on his face that Lup wouldn’t have been surprised if he erected a shrine in her honour after this.

Lup licked her lips, focusing back on what she was doing. He was going to finish soon, she could hear it in his short breaths.

“L-Lup…”

“Go ahead, babe.”

Barry swallowed and closed his eyes. Lup felt his cock throb against the bottom of her feet. She squeezed him between her arches, holding still until he had finished.

Barry opened his eyes again, his mouth falling open as he took in the sight before him. The straps of Lup’s tank top had slipped down her arms and the hem had ridden up, displaying her breasts and belly. Her gorgeous legs were folded at the knees, covered to the ankle in star-patterned leggings, and her bare feet pressed either side of his cock, the toes, bridges, and arches painted with cum.

“Oh god...” Barry murmured, utterly petrified to move a muscle and ruin it.

“My legs are starting to hurt,” Lup said, “Hurry up and get a picture.”

“What?”

“You want to remember this, right?”

Barry definitely wanted to remember this. He carefully collected his phone and held it up facing Lup. Lup threw up a peace sign and stuck out her tongue like she was posing for a profile pic.

Barry put his phone down, and Lup took her feet back and fixed her top. She looked down, then over at Barry, a wicked smile crossing her lips. She took her left foot in both hands and pulled it up to her face.

Barry’s suddenly forgot how to breathe as he watched Lup lick some of his cum off her foot, looking him directly in the eyes as she did it.

Lup’s big cuddly teddy bear was very rarely rough with anyone, but this time he lunged at her wrapping her up in his arms and hugging her like it was all that was keeping him alive. He buried his face in her neck and shoulder, alternating kissing her and mumbling “I love you.” Until it became an endless mantra “IloveyouIloveyouIloveyou.”

Lup laughed and pretended like she was trying to break free before succumbing to the barrage of affection.

Eventually, Barry pinned her down on her sleeping bag and got up on his elbows.

“Let me return the favour. Do you want me to go down on you?” Barry asked.

Lup looked up at him with half-lidded eyes. Now that her curiosity had been satisfied, the remaining alcohol in her system was starting to pull her under, and the comfortable weight of Barry on top of her was not helping in the slightest.

“Sorry babe, I think that’s actually it for me tonight. Maybe we can bank it?”

“Yeah, sure,” Barry replied, with only a hint of reluctance. He gradually detangled their bodies and helped Lup get back into her sleeping bag. She snuggled into the warm cocoon, watching as Barry got into his, cuddled up behind her and kissed the back of her neck.

“I have no idea what I did to deserve an absolute goddess like you...” Barry whispered.

“Mmm, you’ll figure it out eventually…”

Lup closed her eyes, and within a few minutes her breathing had levelled out into the even pattern of sleep. Barry stayed awake for a while longer, trying not to think about the possibility that there were alternate universes where he’d never met Lup.

 


End file.
